In 2007 Dermot Beggan was going around Lough Key with a paintbrush, doing up benches so the place would look well for the opening. He was fresh out of college, home from a year in Australia, with no job and no particular plan. Eighteen years later he walked back in the gate as general manager. He calls it a full circle moment and it is hard to argue with him.

From painting benches to the manager’s office

He grew up in Smutternagh, out near Knockvicar, in a house that looks across the water at the top of Moylurg Tower. School in Corrigeenroe, then St Mary’s in Boyle, which he reckons deserves a podcast of its own. He says himself the Leaving Cert did not go well and he had no notion what to do next, until his mother spotted an ad for a PLC in sport and recreation in Athlone and told him it would be right up his alley. She was right. That led to four years in Sligo and an honours degree, then Australia with four lads from college.

Home again with nothing lined up, he applied to a park that had not opened yet, and was one of the first people taken on by Moylurg Rockingham. When the gates opened he became supervisor of Boda Borg. Four years in, with the recession on and the park closing from November to the end of February, he had to be practical about it. He was renting a house in Boyle with a couple of mates and a winter with no wages was not going to work.

So he moved around the leisure trade for a decade. Zipit. Aura Leisure as a lifeguard and gym instructor. Weekends at Battlebridge Paintball. Five years at a gym in Carrick on Shannon, managing it from the second year on, where he freely admits more time went on the craic with the clients than on anything else. Then Center Parcs in Longford, hired before the village opened and ferried around a building site in a hard hat and boots.

That job was good to him and hard on him. Out the door at twenty past six, in for half seven, back down the road at four to collect two small boys by five. Ten extra hours in the car every week, which is a full working day added on. Emails late at night about who was going to close the unit. He is straightforward about who absorbed the rest of it: Grace had the boys up and out every morning for the guts of four years.

He had already put a marker down at home. He sent Louise Fitzpatrick, who ran Lough Key for sixteen years, a note to say that if anything ever came up that might suit, he would love to get back. She wrote back to say she was thinking of moving on herself. He applied, did two interviews and got the call after Christmas.

The people’s park

He is careful about what he inherited. What he came into was steady and cemented, and he puts that down to Louise, particularly the community she built up around the place. The triathlon club, the swim club, parkrun, all of them use Lough Key as a base, and he has told them nothing changes on that front.

“It is the people’s park. It is something for the community of Boyle and surrounds.”

His standing offer to anyone with an idea is to bring it to him, mad or not mad, and see what happens. Within reason, he adds.

What is out there now

For anyone new to the area, the scale of it takes a while to sink in. The visitor centre has a lakeside cafe seating fifty or sixty, with an outdoor terrace looking out at McDermott’s Castle, Castle Island and the harbour.

Boda Borg is the biggest escape room complex in Ireland, with 47 rooms grouped into themed quests, some of them mental puzzles and some physical. The Adventure Play Kingdom is the outdoor playground for children up to twelve, five euro a child for an all day pass with in and out access. The Rockingham Remembered tour takes you through the old underground tunnels, up Moylurg Tower for the view and back down a second tunnel towards the lake, returning along the Treetop Canopy Walk, which was the first in Ireland when it opened in 2007. It is self guided, about forty minutes at a ramble, with an audio guide.

Three independent operators work out of the park. Zipit runs the aerial ropes course, five levels of it, for ages seven up. There is kayaking and pier jumping on the lake. And two lads have recently set up a Finnish style wood barrel sauna in a spot at the water’s edge with a ramp down for the cold dip, tucked far enough away from the centre to feel private.

There is a caravan and camping park too, with fifty hardstand pitches and two tenting areas, every hardstand with electricity, each pitch nestled into the trees and five minutes’ walk from the lake. The grounds themselves are free to walk, and there is an AstroTurf pitch, also free, open all year round.

A business that has to pay its own way

One thing he wants understood is that Moylurg Rockingham is self sufficient. What the park earns is what the park has. Wages and overheads keep climbing, and there is no cheque arriving to cover the difference.

People coming in just to walk the grounds are welcome, and he says as much, because most of them will buy a coffee on the way out and that is how it works. He is grateful for how loyal local support has been and clear about the stakes. If the model fails, the visitor centre and the attractions go with it.

On that note he raises the annual parking pass himself rather than waiting to be asked, and says he might be being controversial. It rises to 50 euro from February. That is unlimited in and out use for a year, about the cost of ten visits, and most people who have one are out there far more often than that. The money pays for two full time and one part time maintenance staff, mowers, tractors, fuel, strimmers, the barriers, the CCTV and security on site at night.

The balloons are coming back

Anyone who was around Boyle in the late eighties and nineties has the same set of images. Cold, still September mornings. Colour over the treeline. Getting to school with your neck craned.

Dermot’s version is more specific than most. From the front window at home in Smutternagh he could see the top of the tower across the lake, and on a morning with no wind in it he could hear the train horn from Boyle. The balloons announced themselves the same way.

“You could hear the burners before you saw them.”

One morning they were coming his way and he grabbed the bike and went after them, eight or nine years of age, down the road until they landed in a field. He threw the bike down and ran in. There were stickers and pin badges to be collected, and a Club Orange balloon that has stayed with him ever since.

Getting them back was the first thing he wanted to do in the job.

“I was hardly in the seat and I was emailing the Hot Air Balloon Association.”

He eventually got through to the right person and asked what it would take. The answer was that they would love to come back. Cost and insurance were what ended it in the nineties, so once he had the numbers he went to the tourism officer at Roscommon County Council, someone he had got to know on a Failte Ireland trade trip through Germany and Italy promoting Ireland’s Hidden Heartlands. He made the case for what it would mean to Boyle. She came back with close to three quarters of the funding.

Then he had to sit on it for months, because the announcement was the association’s to make, not his.

A free week in September

The 53rd Irish Hot Air Ballooning Championships run at Lough Key from 20 to 26 September, kicking off on the Saturday. Flights are planned for 7am and 5.30pm across the week, weather permitting.

It is a free event. The only thing asked of people is to park in the proper bays and areas, because there will be a lot of children about and a lot of cars. There is a real cost to the park in hosting it.

There will be competition flying between the balloonists, including a hare and hound where one balloon goes up and the rest have to follow and land as close to it as they can. In the old days there was one where they tried to lift a car key off the lake. The public will not be going up, but there may be face painting and extra bits on over the weekend.

If the launch event last summer is anything to go by, the turnout will look after itself. Two balloons, nothing else laid on, and four or five hundred people in the park to watch.

What comes next for Lough Key

A master plan for the park is in its design phase. It was started in Louise’s time, went off a cliff during Covid and was revived after it, and roughly 1.8 million euro in EU Just Transition funding has been secured for design and planning. After that comes planning permission, then construction.

The concepts are on the Lough Key website and Dermot is careful to say that none of them are promised. The thinking is to reuse what is already there rather than build anything big and new.

The stableyard has asbestos on three sides of the roof, and taking it off would open up the bays and archways as an activity hub. An expression of interest notice went out in mid January looking for activity providers to put their hand up. There is a concept for a zipline off the top of Moylurg Tower, either back to the zip cabin or across the lake, which would make it the longest in Europe.

The tower itself could be faced on two or three sides with a climbing wall, a vertical maze and abseiling. A floating boardwalk would mirror the canopy walk along the shoreline, so you would walk on the water and then up into the trees on a looped route. There is talk of a small aqua park, of landscaping the front lawn down to the lake as a family area for picnics, and of putting a canopy over the basement area at the tower to make a stage for concerts, functions and weddings. Anyone who was at the Moone Boy launch out there will already have a picture of how that could work.

There is even a notion of putting a roof back on the church.

The likeliest thing to happen first is the least glamorous. The cafe has outgrown itself, and on a busy August bank holiday the overflow ends up in the Moylurg Room, which is a conference room and feels like one. Expanding the visitor centre should be straightforward enough on the planning side. Dermot is hoping a decent office might come out of it.